Fifteen
by Agent Otter
Summary: "Yeah, there's that sound again. That pause and the almost-silent hiss of signal-drop static. Definitely the sound that the sky makes when it's falling."


Title: **Fifteen**  
Author: **Agent Otter**  
Email: agentotter@earthlink.net  
Category: Will-centric, a little Will/Francie, but mostly drama and violence and craziness.  
Spoilers: "Phase One"  
Rating: PG-13 (violence)  
Disclaimer: ALIAS and all its characters belong to people who are both smarter and more talented than me.

Will is fairly certain that, being a young man, athletic, and in good health, he is not likely to fall victim to a heart attack. But he isn't quite sure anymore, because it took three hours just to get to the I-15, and through the whole trip his heart has been stumbling over itself like a clumsy jackrabbit. His mind is lurching about in much the same way, wondering what's happening in LA, where Sydney is, what she's doing, if she's okay, whether he'll survive to see his first day at the CIA, whether Francie is wearing that strawberry lip gloss again. He forces himself ease off the accelerator, because he's doing 80 in a 65 zone, and then he forces himself to breathe. Sydney will get in touch, he assures himself, once the crisis is over. Assuming she hasn't forgotten him. He's noticed that that happens sometimes, when you're a spy; you forget a few of the less important things.

His companion doesn't seem to be suffering from the same anxiety problems that he is, and he suspects that her reaction is due mainly to ignorance of the fact that her life may be falling apart. She is, however, suffering from severe bad temper, staring sullenly out the window and refusing to look at him. He's tried twenty-two times to draw her into conversation, so he figures twenty-three can't hurt.

"I know this is strange and sudden and kind of scary, Francie, but I swear to you, everything's going to be okay." He lays a hand over hers, squeezes gently, and is finally rewarded by the turning of her head in his direction. Her eyes are cold, and she looks unhappy. Furious. The same way she's looked since he literally pushed her out the door of the restaurant, packed her into the Jeep, and headed for the desert. He doesn't think he's ever seen her this mad; Francie is a born talker, and when she's really angry it usually takes awhile to stop the shouting. He's never seen her so quiet before.

"Sydney will explain everything when we get home. She just wanted us out of town. Something about" -- he thinks fast, and damn it, he should've thought about what he was going to say before he said it, and he's a writer, that means he should be talented with words, if he could only _think_ -- "some kind of extortion at the bank," he finally finishes, lamely. The pause is just long enough to be suspect, and his explanation is just flimsy enough to be translucent. "Syd said we should get out of town. You know, just in case. Maybe these people are Mafia or something." The more he says, the stupider it sounds, so he finally just snaps his jaw shut, swallows hard, and concentrates on the road.

"I need to use the bathroom," Francie says, a long moment later, as if she hasn't been listening at all. "Find a gas station."

Will nods, eager to please, eager to lift her spirits, eager to escape the stifling, accusatory silence in the car. Five more minutes along the road -- they're in Nevada now, and they'll be hitting Vegas soon, but he's not sure exactly where they're going, anyway -- and the signs for the next exit advertise Chevron, Texaco, Holiday Inn, Burger King and IHOP. He pulls off the open road and into an oasis of fast food and fuel.

"You can't call anyone," he tells Francie. The Jeep bounces a little as he pulls into a gas station; the rear wheel catches the edge of the curb, and he curses silently at himself for his inattention to his driving. Francie has never made him nervous before, but she's making him nervous now. He wonders if the feeling springs from a deep-rooted fear that after this stunt, she'll never make out with him again, but ultimately decides that his real fear is that she'll never sleep with him. He's been looking forward to that progression in the burgeoning relationship, but now they're stopped cold. "I'm serious, Francie," he says. He circles the Jeep to park next to open pump and is dwarfed by a neighboring big-rig. He tries not to feel like it's a statement about his manhood. "You can't call Sydney or your bartender or your mom or _anybody._ I'm talking about our lives here. This is serious."

"_Okay,_ Will," she says, and she stalks off toward the bathrooms, pausing only for the passage of 18-wheelers, refusing to yield her path across the scorching-hot asphalt to anything smaller.

"Don't call anyone, Francie!" Will shouts at her retreating back. "I'm not kidding! Don't even talk to anybody! Francie!"

She waves an absent hand at him but doesn't turn around, and then she's vanishing into the convenience store.

Will releases a puff of stale breath and begins filling up the tank of the Jeep. His eyes scan his surroundings: a burly trucker to his left, another wiry one walking back to his rig, a harried mother and her two toddlers dashing into the store, the businessman in the sedan who doesn't look quite scary enough to be a paid assassin. Spring has been skipped over, and California has tumbled directly from winter to summer; it's well into evening, but the heat hasn't retreated, and Will's t-shirt sticks to his back. By the time the tank has finished filling, he's admitted to himself that the whole of SD-6 could be on his heels and he'd probably never spot any of them.

The sensation comes suddenly as he's crossing the parking lot, and for a panicked moment he wonders if he's having that heart attack after all, or if he's been shot, or hell, maybe the bad guys have some kind of new energy ray and they're going to try it out on him. But it turns out that it's just his new CIA-issue cellular phone, set on silent vibrating mode and tucked into his back jeans pocket. He berates himself for the twitchy behavior - who has a heart attack emanating from their ass, anyway? - as he fumbles for the phone, and finally brings it to his ear.

"Uh... hello?"

"Will, thank god," a voice says through a thin haze of static, and he thinks this scratchy, tinny call from nowhere is the best sound he's ever heard.

"Syd, what's going on? Is everything okay?" He makes his way to the front doors of the convenience store, barely avoiding a nasty pedestrian versus pickup incident, and decides that he is currently not capable of walking and talking at the same time. He stops outside the store, wraps his free arm around his stomach in an unconsciously protective gesture, and squints at the neon signs of a run-down bar across the street. It looks oddly appealing.

"Where are you, Will?"

There's an urgent snap to her voice and he tries to focus but he thinks his brain might be on overload.

"The 15," he answers. "A gas station. It's... ah... I don't know. Somewhere in Nevada. Not too far from Vegas."

"Okay. Will, listen. I want you to turn around and come back and when you get here, I want you to go straight to the Santa Monica Pier. Some agents are going to meet you and bring you in; I'm going to ask Vaughn to go so if you see a group of guys and he's not with them, you should run. Understand?"

"Yeah, but Syd--"

"I have to go. But I need to know--Will, what happened with Francie?"

He peers into the convenience store through the windows. _Yeah,_ he thinks, _what did happen with Francie?_ He doesn't see her, and he moves toward the doors. "What about her, Syd? She's safe and sound."

There's a pause, which might in some circles be considered a pregnant pause. Will's mind, used to functioning as a thesaurus, also suggests that he call it a _loaded_ pause or a _weighty_ pause or, more accurately, the sound that reality makes when it crumbles.

"I didn't think you'd get to the restaurant in time," Syd says. The closer he moves toward the doors, the more his cellular signal deteriorates, so he stops moving, but he still can't see Francie inside the store and that's got him worried. "I had a couple of agents run over there. Will, they... they must've gotten to her after you left, I guess. Did you go over there? Or did you just call her and tell her to run? Maybe you thought splitting up would be safer? Maybe--"

"Syd, what are you trying to tell me?" His voice is scratchy and he tries to swallow. He needs a soda. He should go into the store and find Francie and buy a soda and then they can drive home and maybe when they get there, make out some more. Oh god, what is Sydney trying to say?

"Our agents intercepted a... a clean-up crew. Will, they were removing Francie's body. She was shot. Executed."

Yeah, there's that sound again. That pause and the almost-silent hiss of signal-drop static. Definitely the sound that the sky makes when it's falling.

"Syd," he says, and there's a nervous, slightly hysterical chuckle under the name. He steps toward the doors again. He isn't hallucinating. She was here, right here, with him in the car, being strangely sulky. But he can't see her and now he _needs_ to see her and he knows females take a long time in the bathroom but he also knows that there's no way she's still in the bathroom. And that's basically all he knows anymore, about anything. "That's crazy. Francie's here with me. She's fine. I mean, she's pissed off at me, but she's fine."

Most of Sydney's reply is lost in a wave of static as he steps through the doors -- pull, not push, and he must be having a good day because it only takes him two tries to get the damned door open. _She's here,_ he thinks. _I am not crazy. She's right here and she's fine and she's alive._

As it turns out, she's on the telephone. She turns, as if she's sensed him there, as if he brought in an odor of confusion and desperation from the world outside and it's contaminated the air-conditioned coolness of the store. She hangs up, and her eyes are on him the whole time, and Sydney's voice emerges from the digital-conch-shell sound of the cell phone, telling him what he's beginning to figure out on his own.

"Oh God, Will," she breathes, and her voice sounds almost as far away and unreachable as it really is. "Whoever you're with, that isn't Francie."

_Oh God, Will,_ he repeats to himself, _That isn't Francie._

"Gotta go," he croaks into the phone, and ends the call. "I told you not to call anyone," he says to Francie. Or whoever she is. She looks like Francie. For a wild moment he wonders if maybe that Sydney wasn't really Sydney, or if he's not really Will, and then he wonders if he'd be able to tell the difference between this Francie and the real Francie if he were to kiss this one. And he thinks, somewhat despairingly, that maybe he could've lived with her for years and gotten married and had a million babies and never, ever known the difference.

"I was checking my messages," she says. "You didn't say I couldn't do that. I was checking to see if Syd called. She didn't."

He nods, and swallows. His throat is still dry. "That was her, just now," he says. "It's safe for us to come back now."

Francie nods, and even offers up a happy little smile before she breezes out the door. And he can't think of anything else to do but grab a soda from the refrigeration case, pay for the gas, and return to the car. He doesn't try to formulate a plan; he's too incapable and inexperienced and possibly on the verge of hyperventilating, and his brain seems to be capable only of rote motion. So he climbs into the car, drops his drink into an empty cup-holder, starts the engine and pulls out of the gas station, onto the frontage road, and back onto the freeway. Not that he thinks it's a good idea, necessarily -- surely there's a million places to hide a body along this desert road -- but he just can't think of anything else to do.

This time it's south on the 15, back toward civilization, and Francie seems to be in much better spirits. They've been driving into the evening for hours now; by the time they get back to Los Angeles it'll be morning. Will thinks about the Santa Monica Pier and where he's going to find parking down there at whatever hour he might arrive. He thinks about this mostly because he doesn't want to think about any of the other things that are on his mind.

They're on a lonely, flat stretch of highway outside of Victorville when something flashes in front of the headlights. He slams on the brakes, and the car fishtails a little, but he gets it under control and brings it to a screeching, jarring halt at the side of the road. There's a coyote standing on the opposite side of the road, having just experienced a near brush with death, and it simply stands and watches as Will snaps off the engine, yanks the keys from the ignition, stumbles away from the car and is miserably ill next to an unfortunate, scraggly Joshua tree.

He can hear her car door opening and gently closing again, and the crunch of her shoes on the earth-and-gravel roadside. They both know the pretense has ended, now, and he lets go of that final faint lick of hope that told him that maybe Francie wasn't dead, maybe it wasn't as bad as all that, and maybe Sydney had just gone crazy. That might not be so bad; she's always been a little weird so nobody would notice the difference. Maybe he wouldn't have made such a good CIA agent anyway, because before he was kind of okay with the whole cloak and dagger thing but maybe he hadn't thought this through. Maybe he hadn't considered all the contingencies. Like that somebody might replace his friend and would-be girlfriend with somebody... not-Francie.

He rocks back onto his heels and looks up at her, but the motion's too quick and dizzying and the sight of her would've been too much, anyway. He tries to throw up again but there's really nothing left in him. For a moment he thinks maybe his heart is going to lurch up into his burning throat, but it stays firmly lodged where it belongs.

"She was still there, wasn't she?" he finally rasps. There's a pause in which he fortifies himself. "When I came to the restaurant and picked you up. When I took you out to the Jeep. Her body was in there somewhere, in the restaurant. How long had you been there? How late was I?"

When he looks up, there's a look in her eyes that he's tempted to call sympathetic, but then he decides that it's just a combination of the glow from the headlights and the thin sheen of tears obscuring his vision.

She frowns down at him for a moment and then speaks as she's pulling the pistol from the little holster at her hip. "Fifteen minutes," she says. "You probably should've stayed off the 10. It gets crowded that time of night."

He tries to concentrate as she raises the gun, tries to think about Francie -- the real Francie -- and what her laugh sounded like and her hair and her smile and how her lips tasted. He wants to remember that, and not this image of Francie's face with the cold expression or Francie's finger wrapped around the trigger. She seems almost chagrined by his inattention to his imminent demise, so she steps closer, and lets the cool, hard barrel of the gun rest against his forehead.

Will closes his eyes, and breathes what he is sure will be his last breath. Then he thinks about Francie, in her own restaurant, with a hole burning through her head, too. And that's basically all it takes.

He lurches to his feet, and his fists are suddenly driving into that familiar and much-loved face. It's a stolen countenance, and that makes him angrier than he's ever imagined he could be; his attack owes more to surprise and luck than to any kind of skill, but it works well enough, and somehow he ends up on top of her. The gun clatters out of her hand, and his fists are pounding over and over until one injustice is undone, even if he can't undo the other one. She's bloodied and unconscious, and now unrecognizable. He picks up the gun, and he doesn't wait like they do in the movies; he doesn't make any dramatic pronouncements or wait for her to awaken to watch her own doom or set up any kind of elaborate death trap. He points the gun, holding it steady with both hands and bracing his feet like he's seen them do on the Discovery Channel. He aims at her head and he pulls the trigger, methodically, until the gun clicks hollowly and is empty.

His knuckles are coated in her blood when he climbs back behind the wheel of the Jeep, and he can feel wet stains on his clothes, too. He doesn't care much. Will thinks about the Santa Monica Pier and where he's going to find parking. He thinks about this mostly because he doesn't want to think about any of the other things that are on his mind.


End file.
